Gallery Bundu: A Story about an African Past. Paul Stoller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 176 pp.

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The Peace Corps, I was once told, has a matrimonial agency quality to it. It is about helping, and occasionally, espousing third-worlders. It is about roughing it up and sowing one's wild oats. David Lyons, a rather self-absorbed, inconsequential type, does just that (besides dodging conscription to Vietnam, this being 1969): no marriage, however, comes from his encounters with Nigerien women, but a child, whose elusive quest makes up the main drive of an otherwise spectacularly bland story. Paul Stoller's Gallery Bundu is a confessional novel that never lives up to the demanding criteria of that sub-genre, and, more sadly, fails to build on other possible strengths - like the exoticness of the setting (for Western readers) or the potentials for making a political point under the pretext of telling a story.

The novel takes place mostly in Niger, at various points in time between 1971 and today, following the comings and goings of Lyons between New York, Niamey (Niger's capital) and Tillaberi (the small town north of Niamey where he serves as a Peace Corps volunteer). This has a slightly perverse tantalizing dimension: Lyons, himself as uninteresting as an un-carved piece of wood (the bundu in the title means, in Songhay, "wood", as in carved wood art work), meets at several junctures fascinating characters, whom one would rather follow instead of sticking with him, and he chances upon fascinating possibilities - for instance learning the art of seeing in the future, for which a Tillaberi elder told him he has a gift - which are not further pursued.

Nor does one feel that these threads could have been powered by Stoller's writing style. Supposedly, this is Lyons telling his story over tea to West African business partners in the African art shop he runs with his wife in New York, and although the style is written, not oral, it certainly has the endearing but thoroughly bleached quality of a fireside chat conducted by a scrupulously liberal American academic. This, of course, reminds us that Stoller himself is an anthropologist who lived as a Peace Corps in Niger, in the same locales visited by Lyons (some of the people portrayed here are adapted from his real life account of his experience in Niger's Songhay country, In Sorcery's Shadow.) Although Stoller's own story is very different from Lyons', and distinctively more interesting, he certainly endows him with his anthropological concern for minutely describing objects, events and scenes, in extensive passages whose only discernible relevance is to showcase and display expertise and attitudes.

To my surprise, Stoller does not eschew the trap of making of Africa and Africans a backdrop to the lives of a circle of Western agents - mostly French and American - although this is not done in a demeaning way. In fact, it is precisely the sense of respect with which the Nigeriens - and a family of Senegalese traders - are depicted that greatly participates in a stylization which, ultimately, makes them lifeless. The backdrop is usually steeped in misery and hospitality, the two flashing points of decent Africa nowadays: dazed donkeys and maimed beggars abound, as well as folks who force on you endless meals and welcome you with ecstatic clamors. It is marred by a few inaccuracies and anachronisms that would strike the admittedly few potential readers of this novel with knowledge of this area of West Africa, as definite blots: I doubt that children in Abidjan would run up to White men, crying "Toubab! Toubab!" This is more likely to happen in Senegal (where "Toubab" means White person). Describing the past of Zainabou, the beautiful woman with whom Lyons will have a son, Stoller shows her, in the 1960s, dreaming of becoming a student at the University of Niamey which was not founded until 1971.

Descriptions of life in Niamey in general are impervious to the many political and economic changes that transformed the place and its inhabitants over thirty years: but there is in fact no real sense of what is happening in the country outside of Lyons' small circle and his modest problems of growing up awkwardly and belatedly. Even this is not taken up as substantially as might lead us to think of Lyons' story as a kind of Bildungsroman. He doesn't have the internal meat and flesh that would make of his confrontations with the intense issues making up his story - his consorting as a White Westerner with a struggling Black African woman, his sexual escapades in Tillaberi, the racism of the French development workers or, for that matter, that of Nigerien society against half-breed children - life-shaping experience. Lyons, of course, meets his child at the end of the book - when, at least Nigerien readers, would read with a mix of embarrassment and incredulity the rage directed at him by the boy for having left him, a half-breed, in a society which allegedly hates half-breed. This part of the encounter has two conspicuous flaws: no Nigerien, or African-educated child would speak in such a direct, blaming manner to a parent; and inasmuch as it is true that Nigeriens would hate half-breed children (which I find by experience an extreme conception of the author), it is surprising that race-conscious France would fare better on this account: "You have no idea what it's like to grow up a bastard batur in Niger. You never fit in. The kids call you a half-breed, and the adults keep you away from their children [that is simply not true: to wit, there is not even a word for "half-breed" in Niger, apart from the French "mtis", which is in fact indicative of an ambiguously superior social position inherited from colonial times]. In France I'm free." Whatever his individual experience of such matters, Stoller cannot be actually thinking that.

What Stoller really likes is the Songhay country, and Tillaberi. The scenes set in that area are the most captivating. Even the unbearable heat is conveyed to the reader with a sense of utter discomfort that is not without poetic intensity. Stoller reaches a calm lyricism as he describes the mesas of the Songhay country, quiet contemplative hours at dusk, or meaningful relations with local folks. We acknowledge here that we are no longer with Lyons, we are with his carver. The bundu comes alive. Otherwise the novel is quite wooden. It is an effortless read, this said, and I'd recommend it for exposing readers to a world so generally absent from the English language.

Abdourahmane Idrissa
University of Florida